Siena, Piazza del Campo fills with artist Lorenzo Marini's colorful letters

Tomorrow, Wednesday, September 1, artist Lorenzo Marini will perform in Siena’s Piazza del Campo: 40 rubberized circles made especially for Siena will be placed in the iconic square of the Tuscan city. For the artist, they are fragments of an alphabet that does not want to unite words, but on the contrary wants to enhance the beauty of each individual alphabetic sign. This is an event in which art aspires to become horizontal and popular enjoyment. “I have found,” says the artist, “that people like to relate to my works in a fun way, they look for their name, run over it, take selfies and group photos, sit in a circle and create moments of discussion. The meaning of my art, which Mayor Luigi De Mossi has defined as Proto-pop, lies precisely in this: in engaging, in becoming an experience, in creating an immersive relationship.”

At the moment, Lorenzo Marini (considered the leader of “Type Art” and a strong success born with the 2010 manifesto for the liberation of letters) is starring in his solo exhibition Di Segni e Di Sogni, running until Oct. 20, 2021 at the Santa Maria della Scala Museum Complex. It is an itinerary of five installations, the last of which is located right in the Piazza del Campo(Squaretype, composed of 35 circular types in rubberized carpeting). The central theme of the project is the creative interpretation of liberated letters in their most disparate linguistic dimensions. After the exhibition held in Venice at the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, after the exhibition of unpublished works at the Gaggenau hub in Milan and the solo show still in progress in Los Angeles at the Italian Cultural Institute, Siena is hosting an exhibition that aims to celebrate the artistic journey of the creator of “Type Art.”

“Siena is a unique city in the world, a cultural setting where the importance of tradition is celebrated by contrast by such an innovative and experimental language,” comments the artist. “For me, letters were born free and like humans are social but also individual creatures. It is time to celebrate the beauty of the geometry that makes them up and leave the flock of alphabetic type. They are not only necessary for reading or writing, but also for feeding the imagination.” Curator Luca Beatrice writes, “The union of letters forms words, thus meanings that change according to the idiom. Originally, however, they are signs, images. Lorenzo Marini works on this apparently simple, yet foundational concept in the history of languages. Using elements before communication and transforming them into visual phantasmagoria through induced color associations. In Marini’s art we are the ones who choose, who enter into the mechanism trying somehow to recompose it and make sense of an experience. Elegant, funny, explosive, reflective, his poetics redraws and repaints the boundaries of the universe, focusing on the rules of communication, where the effort is to overcome them in search of new alphabets, mysterious and childlike, conceptual and playful.”

The exhibition consists of five “moments,” including a solo show in the St. Pius Room with 22 mixed media works on canvas, encompassing the initial research on characters and alphabets. The other five installations represent visual stories of the recreated alphabet. From the MirrorType mirrored steel installation in the Mantle Chapel, to the monolith that turns on and off after centuries of silence in the Sant’Ansano room. From the depiction of the QWERTY keyboard brought to one hundred times its size, to the shower of six thousand letters suspended between the vaults of the San Galgano hall. All immersive installations include a specially created soundtrack by Mariella Nava.

In the photo: Lorenzo Marini’s “types” on Piazza del Campo.

Siena, Piazza del Campo fills with artist Lorenzo Marini's colorful letters

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